News

“De-Risking” the KC-46

—John A. Tirpak7/25/2014

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Fixes to the KC-46 program are “in hand,” and
the project is doing well overall, Boeing Chief Financial Officer Greg Smith
told financial reporters in a Wednesday teleconference. Aside from a need to
redesign and re-route wiring harnesses, Smith said the sections of the four
prototype KC-46s “came together extremely well” and the harness problem is the
type of thing normally discovered during initial integration, he asserted.
“This is not a technology leap,” he said of the program. “We know how to do
it.” Smith noted that Boeing has created a number of “technology labs” to
anticipate and work through potential obstacles in the tanker project,
particularly with the fuel system, as an effort to “de-risk the program,” he
said. Air Force spokesman Ed Gulick said
that while “the government did not know specific details” of Boeing’s $272
million quarterly earnings charge to cover the cost of the harness fix, “we are
not surprised by the announcement.” USAF’s estimates at completion, or EACs,
“have been consistently higher than Boeing’s for the past three and a half
years.” However, the company has “met every contractual requirement to date.”